Students accept healthier lunches, school leaders report

Date:

July 21, 2014

Source:

Boise State University

Summary:

Seventy percent of elementary school leaders nationwide reported that students generally like the healthier school lunches that rolled out in fall 2012, according to a first-of-its-kind American study.

Share:

Total shares:

FULL STORY

Seventy percent of elementary school leaders nationwide reported that students generally like the healthier school lunches that rolled out in fall 2012, according to a first-of-its-kind national study whose lead author is now a research associate professor at Boise State University.

Seventy percent of elementary school leaders nationwide reported that students generally like the healthier school lunches that rolled out in fall 2012, according to a first-of-its-kind national study whose lead author is now a research associate professor at Boise State University.

Seventy percent of elementary school leaders nationwide reported that students generally like the healthier school lunches that rolled out in fall 2012, according to a first-of-its-kind national study whose lead author is now a research associate professor at Boise State University.

"The updated meals standards are resulting in healthier meals for tens of millions of kids," said Lindsey Turner, a co-investigator for Bridging the Gap, a research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the study. The study is being published online today in Childhood Obesity.

"Our studies show that kids are OK with these changes, and that there have not been widespread challenges with kids not buying or eating the meals," said Turner, who joined Boise State earlier this summer. At the time of the study, she was a research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bridging the Gap is jointly conducted at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Michigan.

Researchers conducted the nationally representative surveys in spring 2013, roughly six months after healthier meal standards put forth by the U.S. Department of Agriculture went into effect. Researchers analyzed survey responses from 557 elementary schools across the country.

Most respondents were either principals or school food service providers. They were asked about students' initial reaction to the meals in fall 2012, and how things were progressing a few months later.

About half of respondents at elementary schools (56 percent) reported that students complained at first, but student acceptance greatly increased by spring 2013. The research on elementary schools included findings about student purchases and how much of the meals students were consuming. A majority of elementary school respondents (84 percent) said about the same number of students, or more, were buying lunch during the 2012-13 school year as did during the previous school year. Seventy-nine percent said elementary school students were eating about the same amount or more of the lunch as they did the prior year. This is important because there have been concerns that many students would stop buying lunches, or would throw away much of the lunches, but that is not what the study results show.

Researchers also found differences based on school location and socioeconomic characteristics:

• Respondents at schools with more students from lower-income families reported increases in the percentages of students buying lunch, compared with decreases at higher socio-economic status schools.

• Respondents from urban and suburban elementary schools reported fewer student complaints and less waste than did those from rural schools. Urban and suburban elementary schools also were less likely to report decreases in the number of students who purchased lunch.

• Respondents did not perceive much change in the amount of food students were discarding. There was less plate waste in elementary schools with a large proportion of students from lower-income families.

Lindsey Turner, and Frank J. Chaloupka. Perceived Reactions of Elementary School Students to Changes in School Lunches after Implementation of the United States Department of Agriculture’s New Meals Standards: Minimal Backlash, but Rural and Socioeconomic Disparities Exist. Childhood Obesity, August 2014 DOI: 10.1089/chi.2014.0038

July 31, 2015  Resettlement projects in the Amazon are driving severe tropical deforestation, according to new research. Widely hailed as a socially responsible and 'innocuous' strategy of land redistribution, ... read more

July 29, 2015  Following the British Medical Association's call for a 20 percent sugar tax to subsidize the cost of fruit and vegetables, experts debate whether a sugar tax could help combat ... read more

July 29, 2015  Black men in England are at double the lifetime risk of being diagnosed with, and dying from, prostate cancer compared with white men in England, according to research. The study also finds that ... read more

July 30, 2015  In a survey of hospital medical physicians across the United States, women made nearly $15,000 less than their male counterparts, with a portion of this disparity explained by female doctors' ... read more

July 30, 2015  China needs to reduce its dependence on coal and improve the range of fuels it uses if it is to have long term energy security, according to new research. The study looks at the future of electricity ... read more

July 30, 2015  It is possible to predict the timing and intensity of influenza outbreaks in subtropical climates like Hong Kong where flu seasons can occur at different times and more than once during a year, ... read more

Nov. 7, 2014  Approximately 60% of the more than 50 million public elementary and secondary education students obtain a substantial portion of their daily calories from school lunches. The 2012–2013 National ... read more

Apr. 8, 2013  A study suggests that states with stricter school meal nutrition standards were associated with better weight status among students who received free or reduced-price lunches compared with students ... read more

Feb. 22, 2013  In Jan. 2012, the United States Department of Agriculture passed a series of regulations designed to make school lunches more nutritious, which included requiring schools to increase whole grain ... read more

Aug. 24, 2010  Children who eat school lunches that are part of the U.S. federal government's National School Lunch Program are more likely to become overweight, according to new research. Yet children who eat ... read more